October 26, 2009

The rich as separate species?

"Futurologist" Paul Saffo is theorizing that the extremely rich will eventually become a separate species of human because they will be able to afford life-lengthening technologies that the poor and middle-class won't have access to:
I sometimes wonder if the very rich will become a completely separate species. Imagine if the very rich can live, on average, 20 years longer than the poor. That’s 20 more years of earning and saving. Think what that means about wealth and power and the advantages that you pass on to your children.
This is, of course, bizarre and far-fetched, something out of a Kurzweilian nightmare. But maybe it's not so far off in terms of a metaphoric parallel to our modern healthcare crisis. Not so much that the rich are on their way to becoming a super race of robot overlords, but in the fact that there are huge gaps in terms of healthcare access which result in huge gaps in quality of life.
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2 comments:

  1. Quality of life doesn't change your genes, which is what it would take for the rich to become a separate species. This is strictly from a biological perspective, of course.

    Now if increased quality of life meant that they reproduced more offspring, and only reproduced with other rich people, then yes they may eventually become a separate species. The males would have to stop renting prostitutes. Too much gene flow into the "not rich" population.

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  2. I think he means the rich being able to purchase actual mechanical prosthetics or implanting digital gene sequences into their genomes...things that 99% of the population couldn't afford, and thus, would grant the ultra-wealthy an advantageous survival element. Genetic selection, or genomes in general, would probably be irrelevant if things reached such a point. Craziness nonetheless...

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